Mexico Open One and Done Strategy: Finding a Winner in a Weak Field

Happy Mexico week! Hopefully, you found part of the big old Genesis purse last week. It’s going to look a bit different moving from Torrey to Vidanta. While last week was an opportunity to burn a big name and try to snag the $4 million, this week is more of a “find someone you’d bet to top ten here” situation.

Purse/1st place: $7,000,000 /$1,260,000

Field Size: 132

With the smaller purse and wider variety of outcomes, I think you can go in any number of directions. If there’s someone down the board you feel VERY strongly about, this isn’t a spot where you’re going to fall too far back if you whiff.

We’ll start looking at the data via the Rabbit Hole, starting with the finishing position view.

Cutmakers

There are some pretty small samples in here with some newer names to the tour. Outside of Lanto Griffin, a ton of the guys falling into the top 10 here (sorted by cut made%) are guys near the top of the betting board. Rasmus is another one with a limited sample, but I don’t think it’s an outlier, he saw Sunday in 20/23 events on the DP World Tour last year with two MC and a WD.

Bombers

You can’t turn your head in this space without hearing about how it’s a bombers paradise. It’s not incorrect, it’s just coming from every single direction. There are a few ways to look at this: Driving Distance, Carry Distance, or Clubhead Speed (that’s in a different menu), and opted to sort by carry for the sake of showing who’s able to do it without the rollout. The Paspalum fairways do grab and slow the ball down a bit more than other surfaces.

Spiking on Ball Striking

It’s a resort course with huge-ass greens. Putting is needed, but hard to predict. More likely the person making all the putts will be doing so because his approach shots put him into a position to. I pulled up the floor/ceiling filter for ball striking and sorted by how ofter golfers can gain 3+ strokes on the field. This is a fun one to look at when you sort by the various buckets and start to see some weird profiles that are worth digging into.

BOB

Scoring is another tough one to predict, and right off the top you see the number one name when we sort by birdie or better percentage also has some bad numbers when it comes to bogey avoidance. Maybe not a reason to cross him off completely as this sample is “all courses, all fields” and digging in further on similar conditions might yield different results. Still another nice starting point when looking for guys who can go low this week.

One and Done Selections

As I said off the top, this week is sort of simple: pick some guys that you already like to win outright. There will be some popular names, but it doesn’t mean you have to automatically avoid them. I hesitate to use the word “safe” for anyone here since we aren’t dealing with guys who are consistently rated in the top ten.

Safe-ish

Akshay Bhatia
Stephan Jaeger
Rasmus Hojgaard
Aaron Rai
Alex Smalley

Get a little Weird

Chan Kim
Carson Young
Rico Hoey